


Fading

by ItalianRampallian (Anglo_Salad)



Series: Aftershocks [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bad Wolf Side Effects, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, Pete's World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 13:05:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15558345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anglo_Salad/pseuds/ItalianRampallian
Summary: John Wilfred Smith has everything a man could want.





	Fading

John Smith- and that’s his name now, John Wilfred Smith- has everything a young man could want.

That’s all he is now, is a man.

But he’s a man with a ring on his finger, and Rose bloody Tyler has the other one.

They have a piece of TARDIS, growing rapidly in their backyard, and occasionally Pete and Jackie relinquish Tony long enough for them to have a child to tell stories to.

When he was the Doctor- and a part of him was the Doctor, he knows it- time was accounted for by the changes in his companions. Now, though, he can watch it in his family.

He can watch it in himself.

Tony turns ten, and his golden hair curls out under his cap as he runs up to his ‘big brother’ and asks to hear the stories of his Uncle Jack.

(He’s never met Jack Harkness, never will, as Jack Harkness hasn’t been born yet, and won’t be until long after Tony is just a memory.)

He pulls Tony into his arms- and though the boy is small for his age, it is harder than expected- and catches a glimpse of his own graying hair in the mirror

Ten years have passed, and he and Tony are proof, but he looks at Rose- still twenty-four and perfect- and no time has passed at all.

* * *

Tony is fifteen when the TARDIS starts working, and this time it’s a blue police box out of nostalgia, not because of a faulty circuit, and Rose disappears inside.

It’s not that she never leaves- in fact, she spends as much time with her family as ever- but in the time she should be sleeping is spent tinkering, analyzing charts from Torchwood. 

John pretends not to know what- not who- she’s looking for.

He goes looking too, and he finds a Martha (Who, he has to remind himself, has never been compared to a summer’s day, never run out of oxygen, is not  _ his  _ Martha) working as top surgeon in small hospital just South of London.

He goes to visit one day, but his eyes lock on the graying little streak of her hair- the one Rose should have but doesn’t- and freezes. 

He pretends not to notice her curious gaze as he walks out of the building.

He finds a Donna, a part of him he misses more than his second heart, but she is lost and broken and unhappy.

He watches her sob as her husband pushes divorce papers her way over dinner.

He wishes he’d never found her at all. 

* * *

Tony is twenty-five, and he and Rose are often mistaken for John’s twin children, the year everything falls apart

John is jolted awake by the noise one night, too used to the emptiness in the bed beside him to even ponder it as the cloister bell rings.

The noise that accompanies it, however, is not the tearing of the thin fabric of space-time. It is a gunshot, a cannon, a hole blown in an impenetrable wall. 

By the time he meets Tony in the garden, the TARDIS is gone.

 

John Smith. That’s all he is, John Wilfred Smith, the man who lost everything.


End file.
